The World Wide Web is a vast repository of information that connects people, providing them access to millions of web resources via the Internet. Social Networks are growing exponentially, which presents challenges for enterprises who want to monitor and mine these social networks. There is market opportunity for players who can mine intelligence out of social media. Social Network Analysis (SNA) relates to mapping, understanding, and analyzing interactions across a set of people. Social networks, both formal as well as informal can foster knowledge sharing among participants. The exchanges that take place in social networking environments go beyond providing direct value to the user. It fosters collaboration among participants and can lead to aggregation of highly influential content and ideas within various types of social media. Content generated in social networking environments would include discussion threads, logs of chat room conversations, contents of blogs, and any other content posted by users. This collection of content comes from original sources (creation of the user), referenced sources (material cited and presented by users) and aggregated content (collection of material assembled in a unique manner). As long as members continue to add useful or relevant content to the group, the positive network externalities would draw new members to the group.
The accumulated content and ideas within successful social networking environments thus becomes an aggregation of the collective intelligence of the user community participating in those sites. The accumulated content can be considered as an asset that has value, which can be tapped through the right types of analyses. This asset has potential value to both owners of the sites as well as the organizations whose products and services being discussed. It presents significant implications for enterprises wanting to leverage social networks to draw insights and inferences on user participation and preferences expressed in networks. Thus, to monitor and analyze the content posted in a social network by a key influencer becomes very important to enhance decision making ability of any organization.